Wise priest NPC

[missmvicious]

Advice?

No one's going to fight this guy. He needs to just be a wellspring of knowledge. I'm making it a Cloistered Cleric, using the Elite Array, Prime Int, dump CON, giving me 104 Skill Points at L8 if I put +2 in INT by then.

But where should I put those darn extra skill points? Since he's just cloistered away in the abbey, I'm thinking mostly knowledge. I've got:

Decipher Script: 11
Know: 11 (each) -- Arcana, History, Local, Religion, The Planes
Speak Language: 11
Spellcraft: 11

And with his Bardic (Cleric) Knowledge, I don't know just how many of those points are wasted points. But he's more meant to be helpful to the PCs than annoying, so I thought I'd take this time to plow through a lot of INT based skills that are useful, but on a tertiary level, to PCs. Provided they watch their p's and q's, tithe appropriately, and come to tonight's sermon, the priest would be delighted to share what he knows about whatever magic item, artifact, lore, or whatever the PCs want or need answers to, but I don't want the NPC to be an auto-plot-point. He has to roll those Knowledge checks and possibly not get the answer right or downright not know the answer at all.

Anyway... I've got 5 Skill Points left.

Do I just dump them into Heal and move on, or do you think I should redistribute points a bit? I wonder if I overdid it on Speak Language. He's Human... if that matters, because he only starts with Common and whatever his INT bonus gives him at 17... so that's 3 + 11, right? So that's almost every language in the PHB (20 total) by L8.

[Urpriest]

I doubt he needs that many languages.

Anyway, Knowledge(Architecture and Engineering) might be nice, as might Dungeoneering.

Diplomacy might be appropriate, even though he may not use it that much. Sense Motive is nice for anyone dealing with PCs, so is Spot, Listen, and Forgery (this last only if your PCs have figured out that it's impossible to detect a Forgery without Forgery and try to exploit it).

[missmvicious]

Hm. Then I might drop SL down to 5 and use the 6 Skill Points to max out hmm... Arch & Eng never gets selected in any of the campaigns I host. And it would be amusing to have him prattle ceaselessly on about the flying buttresses in his cathedral.

That still gives him a hardy 8 languages to work with. That still sounds impressively diverse. I like.

Thanks, Urpriest!

Have an internet. :smallbiggrin:

[missmvicious]

Incidentally, can Cloistered Clerics use shields? Now that I'm building one as an NPC, I kind of want to build one for a campaign.

They would be scary on a point-buy system... pretty much all INT, extra spells, and a free domain. It's like they made a Divine Wizard and gave her some armor.

[LansXero]

Well, its an NPC but... why not an Archivist? Seems like it does what you want and more.

[Psyren]

Incidentally, can Cloistered Clerics use shields?

Difficult to say; "Except as noted below" means that the cleric's entire weapon and armor proficiency section is replaced with what you see in the CC entry. (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/classes/variantCharacterClasses.htm#clericVariantCloistere dCleric) Shields are not mentioned, so one can conclude they are not proficient with shields.

On the other hand, every other class specifically mentions when they lack shield proficiency, so it's a bit of a gray area. But I'd lean towards them not having it.


Well, its an NPC but... why not an Archivist? Seems like it does what you want and more.

Archivists don't have bardic knowledge built-in though; they need to PrC to get it, which could mean belonging to an organization e.g. Paragnostic Assembly.